Mix dough by folding and stretching in the bowl for 20 strokes. Repeat this 3 more times at 20 minute intervals.

Refrigerate dough, covered tightly, for 21 hours.

Divide into 4 equal parts and preshape gently for baguettes.

Allow preshaped pieces to rest, covered with plastic, for 1 hour.

Shape into ficelles (short, thin baguettes).

Proof en couche or on parchment paper dusted with semolina for 45 minutes.

Pre-heat oven to 500F with baking stone in middle rack and a cast iron skillet and a metal loaf pan on the lowest rack. Preheat 45 minutes or longer before baking.

3-5 minutes before baking, place a handful of ice cubes in the loaf pan. Shut the oven door. Bring water to a boil.

Transfer the ficelles to a peel and load them onto the baking stone. Pour one cup of boiling water into the skillet. Close the oven door.

Turn the oven down to 480F.

After 10 minutes, remove the loaf pan and the skillet from the oven.

Continue baking for another 10-15 minutes until the loaves are nicely colored, the crust is hard all around and the bottom gives a hollow sound when tapped. Internal temperature should be at least 205F.

Cool on a rack completely before slicing.

Anis Bouabsa is a young Parisian boulanger who won the prize for the best baguettes in Paris in 2008. He gave Janedo, a French home baker extraordinaire and a member of TFL, his formula, and Jane shared it with us. He uses a technique of a long, cold fermentation which has been used, with variations, by a number of contemporary French bakers.In addition to producing wonderfully flavored bread, it also permits the home baker to make bread using two blocks of about 2-3 hours rather than requiring longer time blocks. For example, I mixed the dough yesterday evening after dinner. I took it out of the refrigerator at about 4:30 pm this afternoon, and we ate it with dinner at 7:30 pm.These ficelles sang loudly coming out of the oven. I cooled them for only 20-30 minutes. The crust was very crunchy, and the crumb had a sweetness that would make one think there was sugar in the dough. Very yummy.Variations on Bouabsa's formula, adding 100 gms of sourdough starter and substituting 10% rye or whole wheat flour for an equal amount of white flour, make a delicious pain de campagne, which has become a favorite bread of several of us.This is described in my blog entries under "Pain de Campagne" and "San Joaquin Sourdough."Enjoy!David

Comments

second ive tried the directions posted but my baguettes dont seem to bloom in the oven. i suspect it must be due to my shaping skills. when shaping the baguette after the 60min rest, how 'tight' do you roll? is one to treat the dough gently or push out the air? i watched a few clips on youtube and it seems that the final shaping of the baguette is pretty tight.

This should be a fairly slack (wet, sticky) dough. You should handle it very gently when shaping. You absolutely do not want to "push the air out," but you don't want to do that in any bread when you are shaping. Well, maybe popping huge bubbles in a ciabatta.

There are lots of other things that influence bloom in the oven though. You must not over-proof. You need a hot oven. You need high humidity in the oven for the first third to half of the bake.

good news i made progress. after rereading many times your post, i used extra water in the skillet, proofed much less, and it made such a big difference. i tried 2 diffrent flours. 1 gold medal all purpose and the second is gold medal bread. the all purpose was much better. the breads with more of a rise was the all purpose. the first batch sort of well done. also it was in the fridge for 36+ hours. thanks for the help!

ahh yes, the first batch was overdone by accident. also i forgot to turn down the temperature! sometimes i get too excited watching the bread bake, i forget directions. i think that i figured since i keep opening the oven, i might as well set the temp slightly higher to compensate for heat loss. i will try again this wednesday.

I've just recently joined the site after snooping around for awhile. I just finished my first try at baking the ficelles using Boabsa's formula. Everything seemed to be going well up until the preshaping step. After the 21 hours in the fridge the dough seemed to have almost doubled (although it didn't look like a whole lot of dough I must say). I had tons of trouble handling the dough, it was impossibly sticky. Is this normal? I've seen several videos of baguette shaping and mine just seemed way to soft and sticky to shape properly.

Slashing with a razor blade was difficult as well. Even when trying to make quick slashes the blade would stick and drag the dough.

In the end they turned out fine (a bit mishapen) but the crum was probably not as holey as it could be and the crust maybe slightly under crispy (there was a decent crispness factor but not as good as David's above). Should it be so crispy that it's almost as if the slices have been in a toaster?

This is a somewhat slack dough and is on the sticky side. It is easier to handle if you have developed the gluten really well. I use the stretch and fold in the bowl technique. It works really well. Here is Hamelman's description:

It is necessary to use a light, fast touch in shaping. Pressing hard on the dough will make it stick to your hands. Strive for fast moves, leaving your hands in contact with the pieces for as short a time as possible with each manipulation.

In scoring, again, fast moves. Wet your blade before each cut.

The crust should be crisp. Leaving the baguettes in the turned off oven with the door ajar for 5-7 minutes helps dry the crust after baking. It will get soft in a couple hours or three.

Your crumb looks pretty good to me.

I hope these tips help.

BTW, standard baguettes are around 65% hydration. So the videos are often misleading. This is a slacker dough than "standard."

Trying your formula and improving my baguette scoring techniques will be the focus of my upcoming weekend baking. Would you please give me some suggestions on what I could have done differently in terms of angle, depth and handling, etc., based on my 090525 batch? Any comments are greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I'm not sure what your question is. Your "090525 batch" was a boule, unless there is a message I can't find. Scoring boules is quite different from scoring baguettes. Both techniques are covered in my "Scoring Tutorial." I don't have anything to add to that.

Looking at your baguettes on Flickr, I can see how you need to change your scoring.

Assuming you want the "traditional" baguette scoring rather than the single cut I used for the ficelles, you need to make each cut almost parallel to the long axis of the baguette. Each cut should be about 4 to 5 inches long. Each cut should overlap the previous one by 1/4 to 1/3. The cuts should have about 1/2 inch of dough between them, where they overlap.

Please excuse my poor drawing, but I hope it helps.

Don't forget to hold the blade at a shallow angle to the loaf and to make each cut quickly and firmly, about 1/4 inch deep. You are creating a "flap" of dough that will, hopefully, open up and rise above the surface of the loaf during baking to create nice bloom and a nice ear.

After 21 hours my dough had more air, bubbles, and activity that I had ever seen. I wasn't really sure where to go from there hoping to not mess it up so I went back to recipe written above (and cut and pasted steps7-16 below, now numbered 1-10).

I divided the dough into 4 pieces VERY CAREFULLY as instructed but felt like I lost some of the air and bubbles. After resting for an hour I VERY CAREFULLY "shaped into ficelles" and here I felt like I lost even more air and bubbles. i DON'T THINK i EVER RECOVERED FROM THERE AS (please excuse the caps) as during the resting times I never got any more rise. Could someone please go into more detail about how to exactly proceed following the 21 hours in the fridge. I felt like I was so close only to watch it go out the window after waiting the 21 hours. The taste was good, the crumb was fair but my bread didn't "Blow" like I want it to. Any help is Greatly Appreciated. Thanks.

Allow preshaped pieces to rest, covered with plastic, for 1 hour.

Shape into ficelles (short, thin baguettes).

Proof en couche or on parchment paper dusted with semolina for 45 minutes.

Pre-heat oven to 500F with baking stone in middle rack and a cast iron skillet and a metal loaf pan on the lowest rack. Preheat 45 minutes or longer before baking.

3-5 minutes before baking, place a handful of ice cubes in the loaf pan. Shut the oven door. Bring water to a boil.

Transfer the ficelles to a peel and load them onto the baking stone. Pour one cup of boiling water into the skillet. Close the oven door.

Turn the oven down to 480F.

After 10 minutes, remove the loaf pan and the skillet from the oven.

Continue baking for another 10-15 minutes until the loaves are nicely colored, the crust is hard all around and the bottom gives a hollow sound when tapped. Internal temperature should be at least 205F.

I'm not clear as to what didn't work. You got good taste and good crumb. What wasn't good? Photos would help.

What you describe is little expansion during proofing, as I understand it. This could be just that you needed to give the baguettes more time. It might also be that your weren't gentle enough in pre-shaping and shaping them. This takes practive.

Although I have only baked a few Lahey/Bittman "no knead" breads before , I took the jump/challenge with this one and I am thrilled with the results. It is doable by a rookie (with a firm but not overly hard hand).

I made this recipe exactly as written and then a few days later did it with the substitution of 200 grams of flour and water with the addition of a friend's sour dough which I then used a bowl stretch and fold x 3 with 2 stretch and fold on the counter to practice that technique but I did not do the 21 hour cool temp rest. Both turned out amazing. I have not yet graduated to putting pics of my bread and crumb on line so as to then link them to this site but trust me the results of this base can be tremendous even to those with minimal experience!

I do think however without viewing a number of Youtube videos of the stretching and folding, shaping and forming the results would have been much worse. Seeing the activity was critical I think to handling this this dough.

For those wondering just what is produced, the yield was 4 "smallish" loaves, about 15 inches long, since that was the longest dimension of my pizza stone.

Half a loaf would be just right for a large sandwich for one (but I could not limit myself to only that) or two great bases for garlic bread to accompany a meal.

As it happens, I'm not using that technique any more. However, the idea is to have the oven humid when you load it and to have a burst of steam right after loading. What you are doing probably accomplishes the same thing. However, you are not going to be getting the burst of steam with pyrex that you do with cast iron - especially with the lava rocks.

We have pretty hard water, so the cast iron skillet gets mineral deposits. I bought a new skillet to use just for oven steaming.

Any recommendations, from you or others on shaping these sticky boogers when you have limited space? Love the stretch/fold in the bowl method while living in my RV but still figuring out where the heck I'm going to work with my doughs.

I'm going to be trying this on my outdoor gas grill so any extra suggestions regarding this would be appreciated as well. My plan is to pick up some saltillo tiles to cover the grill grates and then place these ficelles on a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Hoping I love this recipe, can use it as my everyday practice recipe to learn how to work with stretchy rye dough without the expense of wasting so much rye.

Do you have a comprable whole grain recipe you could point me towards with the no-knead method?

Since taking a Le Cordon Bleu baking class in Paris, I have been hooked on baking. I spent countless amount of hours and butter to try to perfect the croissant in my own home oven. Now, with a better understanding on protein content, overproofing, etc, I felt it was time to jump in and start the long road in perfecting the baguette. I have been reading and re-reading and re-reading (can i re-iterate the re-reading part) the blogs of your journey to perfecting the baguette, that you, Mark, Janedo and others have so unselfishly been posting. Although LCB had a different recipe for the baguette, I decided to try Anis Bouabsa's version. This is what I did:

I followed your instrustions, BUT, used Mark's 5 second kneading with the dough hook 3x technique instead of the no-knead version you posted. I don't know why, but after the 18 hour retardation (really wanted to have them for dinner), I inadvertantly divided them into 3. 290 grams, 290 grams, and finally 308 grams. After I had pre-shaped them, I realized you had mentioned that you divided your dough 4x - making each pre-shaped dough appx. 220g. each. I was off my 70 g for each pre-shaped dough. I was really stressed. But, I had no choice but to forge forward.

After an hour, I did shape them, but did not feel that the dough was responsive to rolling. Is this usual??? I had to stretch them out a bit. And I let them proof en couche for 45 min. I put them directly on pizza stone at 500 degrees with steam for 10 of the 25 min. I found that I could not go the entire 25 minutes since it was starting to burn. I also realized how important scoring the ficelles correctly assists in a better baguette. Anyways so my questions:

1.) Why did it burn at 20 min?? Heavier dough, I would think would require more baking time. I did forget to decrease temp to 480. Would that have made that big of a difference?

2.) How do I know that I have scored deeply enough? I don't want to deflate?

3.) After the dough has been shaped into the final ficelles, did you proof under a plastic bag or leave it open?

The results: Despite the burn, the crumb was amazing. Big holes and it did have a sweet taste. I was really surprised with the sweet taste. Great crust. I should have taken a picture, but it was all gone by the time I thought about taking them.

How the dough handles depends on its consistency and on gluten development. The same hydration level will yield different doughs depending on how your flour absorbs water. Your description of your shaping issue suggests your dough was pretty slack (wet). You sound like you dealt with it well. Note that shaping should be done on the board without flour. Now to your questions:

1. I preheat the oven to 500ºF but turn it down to 460-480ºF immediately after loading the loaves. Yes. 20ºF makes a big difference in how dark the loaves will be.

2. Slack doughs should be scored more shallowly than firmer doughs. 1/4 inch deep is about right for the Bouabsa baguettes. Scoring should be at a shallow angle for baguettes. Steam helps the cuts open up, but too much steam tends to obliterate the ears.

3. I proof baguettes on a linen couche. The couche is folded over the loaves. If it is warm, I may also dust the loaves with flour and cover them with plastic during proofing.

It sounds like your baguettes turned out well, except for the dark crust. I'd love to see photos. Next time, eh?

Thanks for your help! I'm on my 2nd attempt at baguettes this am. This time I've doubled the recipe. I'm assuming keeping it at 75% hydration, using 1/2 tsp of instant yeast per kilo works. I will definitely remember to turn it down the next time.

The 1st time I attempted to make baguettes, I mixed the dough using my Kitchenaid artisan 325 W mixer and it was fine for 1 recipe. Since I doubled the recipe, i am using my Kitchenaid Pro 610. Incorporating Mark's advice, I lessened the amount of time on #2 speed to 1 minute and increased stir speed time. The KA Pro is a new machine, and this is the 1st time I've used it, so I hope it will create same results as the 1st batch.

I'm uploading the pics of my 2nd attempt of Anis Bouabsa's baguettes. I can't seem to get the scoring right. I feel like I've scored enough, but once in the oven, I can immediately tell I didn't score deep enough. What do I need to do?

The problem with your scoring is not that it's too shallow. For classic baguette scoring, the cuts need to be almost parallel to the long axis of the loaf and overlapping about 1/4 of their length. Like this:

I'm having a bash at your baguette and was interested re the amount of fast acting yeast as the one I use in the UK (Doves Farm) suggests 1tsp per 500g of flour. Is just 1/4 tsp enough per 500g? or does the long retard make up for this......

Thanks David, will try that next time as it is now retarding in the fridge, I did use 'bout 1/4 tsp for half the recipe, and will let you know how that turns out, it is quite a wet dough to work with and I did give it little stretch n fold before popping it into to the fridge. I did also add a splodge of sourdough starter (rye) for more of a pain campagne taste and as ever a little of my friends greek olive oil!, i'm also baking the Pierre Nury rustic rye tomorrow as well so hopefully plenty of good bread for the weekend cheese board and breakfasts

I have a new oven. Out with the old 24" and in with the new Thermador Professional 30" convection. Although I'm super excited about the oven and what it can do, I'm perplexed as to how to bake my baguettes. I normally heat a cast iron pan and boil water. Put the pan at bottom of oven and put the baguettes on stone. Then I pour boiling water in the pan to create steam.

How do I create steam in a convection oven? I've read that you can really use the convection fan to your benefit. Does that mean I preheat the oven using the convection mode, put the pan on a rack, put dough on stone, and pour water in pan? Do I turn off the convection mode and switch to bake after I put the water in?

I have a KitchenAid convection oven. I pre-heat at 500/convection. I don't see a clear difference between baking with convection or conventional settings, except you do need to lower the temperature for convection. My oven seems to heat very evenly even with conventional baking.

So, I made the ficelles and I followed the recipe accurately. The dough was quite slack so scoring was unsuccessful and came out more like a Pain a l'ancienne. Crumb, taste, and crust were great but I was not happy with the looks. Should I have added more flour as I stretched & folded to bring it to French dough consistency? Well see picture to see what it looked like.

I use anywhere between 360 and 375 gms of water to make these. How the dough turns out depends on the flour and the weather. It also depends on how well you develop the gluten. For wetter doughs, a couple additional stretch and folds on the board can make a big difference.

I'd recommend you try making these a few more times using different hydration levels in the above range and see what pleases you the most.

BTW, many like the more rustic look you got. How was the crumb and flavor?

I did an additional 2 S&Fs at 45 minute intervals as per your comment a couple posts ago and I could see a very big improvement in the gluten development when I was S&Fing the dough the last 2 times.

I used KA French Style flour and I don't think I am liking it. I want to try with AP flour and see what the difference would be. The crumb and flavor were great, better than any Pain a l'ancienne I have made in the past with the same flour. I have no problem working with slack dough and I am really great at getting the rustic look but some day I would like to make some pretty baguettes, haha.

KAF French-style flour is relatively low gluten and makes an exceedingly extensible dough. This is desirable for shaping baguettes, but it works best at about 65% hydration. It doesn't absorb as much water as KAF AP, not to mention Bread Flour. You might like the flour better at lower hydration.

I've made baguettes using 6 or 8 different formulas. The ones I like best are Bouabsa's, Gosselin's and proth5's. All are good. Each is different. I have descriptions and formula's for all of these on my TFL blog. If you really like making baguettes, and If you want the most traditional baguettes, try proth5's. They are made with levain (no added yeast) and are wonderful, if you have all the techniques. For me, they had the best flavor second to the Gosselin's which are quite slack and challenging to mix but have amazing flavor.

If you have BBA the Poolish Baguettes recipe is a WW French bread. I have not made it but I have heard good things about it. Or, you can make Reinhart's Pain de Campagne. It's 15.8% whole wheat flour, and is awesome. I make it all the time and you can shape it any way you want.

Also, I don't see why you can't use any of these baguette recipes and substitute 50g of WW in for some of the regular flour. I know a lot of people substitute some Rye or WW for some added flavor in their baguettes with great results.

I believe BFB is a bread flour and it is higher protein than AP flour.

The flour and water isn't mixed by time. It's mixed until it forms a mass incorporating all the flour and water. The dough will be very sticky at this point. The purpose of this step (the autolyse) is for the flour to absorb the water and for gluten to start forming. The dough gets less sticky as the gluten is developed with time and stretch and folds.

The yeast could be added at the first step, especially if you are using dry yeast. Traditionally, the autolyse is done before adding leavening or salt.

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